Posted
by
timothyon Saturday March 10, 2012 @07:20AM
from the sources-suggest dept.

First time accepted submitter Sez Zero writes "Google and ASUS have been collaborating on a co-branded 7-inch Android tablet, with a launch as early as May, according to sources, challenging low-cost rivals and the iPad with a $199-249 price tag. The fruits of the partnership, whispered to the runes readers at DigiTimes by industry sources, will take on the NOOK Tablet and the Kindle Fire, with ASUS selected for its willingness to flex to Google's requirements."

Which hurts the quality of the product and hardware. This has been a huge problem with Android - customers don't really know if they get a good product or not. When they get iPad or iPhone they know exactly that they will love the experience. Android ecosystem is a complete mess.

Not replace for watching that same content, but by using more time up. Instead of sitting there passively watching... whatever, I've noticed my wife can't sit there and just have the TV on. She'll have the ipad on her lap, browsing Facebook, playing some daft word game. The shows change but it's more background noise than actual watching. THAT'S how tablets are.. not replacing for now, supplementing is probably fairer to say.

If you used to spend (x) amount of time watching TV, how much time do you use a

Actually I'll call bullshit on this and for a good reason: I recently purchased an Asus Zenbook UX21. Up untill this point I have never purchased Asus gear and have always gone for Toshiba and Fujitsu notebooks which have never let me down. But this Zenbook was preposteriously inexepensive, exactly the form factor I needed, and immediately available so I went for it. I'm so glad I did - I love the thing. It's well constructed and has killer hardware, the screen is nice, the keyboard is nice, it even looks nice. There are some small complaints about it sure but they are negligable unless I want to spend twice the price for a Toshiba Ultrabook (which looks fantastic, but basically the same specs + some minor polish and a few bells and whistles at 2x the price).

True. I'd never bothered with Asus before either, but seeing how well made the EEE Transformer is, and how they're pushing the designs for newer tablets/laptops AND how they're supporting their equipment with updates, I'll be looking at them for future purchases. I know they've been around for ages, but looks like they're really stepping up and taking a spot in the usual line up of machines.

Your stance is exactly why Apple can charge so outrageous prices for their products and get away with it.

Seriously, most Android phones are excellent, are fast enough for their purpose and are well built. How many have you tried?

When people compare Android phones to iPhones they often compare the CHEAPEST model to to the most expensive phone on the market! FAIL - try comparing a midrange price Android to an iPhone... most like 1/3 to 1/2 the price of the iPhone. Believe me, that phone just works.

Actually it's quite the opposite. Every device Google has had a personal hand in designing has been one perfect experience after the other. It is typically the handset manufacturers who are unable to code decent software, then the carriers who load the devices up with junk that ruin the experience.

I have an ancient phone, yet I run CM9 on it. It is far smoother than phones twice as expensive, rather new, and spouting features like dual core processors depending on who had a hand in making the software.

I for one am excited about what google can come up with in this partnership.

I use lots of Bluetooth devices. You could almost call me a Bluetooth fan boy if there was such a thing and never not once has my Nexus S exhibited the behavior you are describing. And that is on a stock ROM. Not everything is perfect but you could cite examples of bugs in every device ever invented. I've been very happy with my S during the course of its life and only replaced it when the much superior Galaxy Nexus was released.

It may not fit your preference for the carefully curated device and I do see advantages to the Apple way but consumers like choice even if it does effect app compatibility which is what this is really all about. People like low prices and some Androids deliver that. People like hardware keyboards and some Androids deliver that. People like huge honking screens (me!) and Android delivers on that as well. Hell, there are even nut balls that like Android on their wristwatch (what? Like you don't think its cool) and yes, judging by the rooted Motorola ACTV sitting on my nightstand, Android has delivered. You can scream fragmentation all day long but its a hollow cry as the consumers have spoke and continue to speak to the tune of 850,000 activations a day. Now that fact may offend your delicate sensibilities but guess what? You are just one person and you don't get to tell anybody else what to think.

i.e. you have no counter argument. If there's any delusion, it's yours

Actually your talking points have been so thoroughly debunked ad nauseum that I let my sibling have it this time. Don't think so highly of yourself. your arguments aren't new. You didn't think of any of it and better men than you that actually did come up with that stuff have already been slapped down. Now go lick your wounds and hunt around on hacker news and engadget for a new playbook.

Ha ha ha. Hey, stupid. I just got around to bothering to check your links. Have you even read them? In all of them I'm owning you and getting modded up while you are sitting at 0 and -1. What a jackass. That's your problem Alexander. You don't check your work. That's why you are the host file and secunia "troll". When people fact check you you're always wrong. That must do terrible things to your psyche.

is based on a proper, randomized survey of 2000 households nationwide. The numbers of "loyal" users for Apple (83%) and Android (81%) are statically the same, because they're within the margin of error of the study, and both are very high.

To put it another way, your cite is crap. Both Apple and Android users ar

It's rarely about preferring Android phones. And even where it is, it's mostly an uneducated preference. When Android owners are asked whether they will buy another Android in future, most say no. Amongst iPhone owners, most say they will buy another iPhone.

This is just not true.

"83 percent of current iPhone users intend to buy an iPhone again this holiday season; 81 percent of Android OS users said the same."

Anyone who buys a tablet that needs to be jailbroken or rooted is a sucker. What's special about a tablet that makes people think its okay to own only 90% of what you paid for?

That people have to scour forums for how-to instructions and downloads to get really basic shit running on devices they *PAID* for is ridiculous, and watching people drool over the opportunity to do so is depressing. Idiocracy becoming reality right in front of us.

Nobody in a developed society can avoid being affected by fashion. A lot of people out of it are as well. I am wearing what I like - jeans, trainers and a rugby shirt (haven't played in decades). This is all affected by fashion. I avoid wearing certain types of fashion because they fit my self image and even beliefs and preferences. (It is a Scotland rugby shirt for example.)

Just because you can attach some trendy label (see what I did ) to someone doesn't make there opinion invalid. If you have a rational rebuttal then give it but insulting him just makes you look like a bully. And if you can't rebut him then either he is just giving his opinion which he's entitled to or he's giving facts in which case why are you arguing anyway? Maybe you need to crack open that Blue Ribbon.

Good thing they chose ASUS over Acer. I had an Acer Liquid-E - it was a total POS. Within 6 months I had it replaced 3 times. After about a month, the battery life would go down to about 20 minutes. After the 3rd replacement in 6 months, I prevailed upon my carrier to forward date my new hardware eligibility and got a Samsung Galaxy S (which as been great).

Actually it can and for two reasons. First of all, it isn't competing in the same price range as the iPad and judging from the success of the Fire and Nook, there are millions of budget conscious tablet buyers and there are likely many millions more. Secondly the specs of the Fire are fine. It's just loaded down with Amazon's UI gunk and an older build of Android that doesn't have the modern features of Ice Cream Sandwich and soon to be released Jelly Bean. The biggest issue being lack of video acceleratio

If this does not have all of those, it is a failure as I can buy one of the other android tablets from a better company name, you can get the Samsung or Motorola tablets at Staples for $299-$399 right now and I know that hardware is better than ASUS.

Come on ASUS, you guys used to know what you were doing. Now it's a year late and a processor core short.

you can get the Samsung or Motorola tablets at Staples for $299-$399 right now and I know that hardware is better than ASUS.

Sure the hardware is better, but it won't run anywhere near as well. If Samsung and Motorola have shown just one thing it's that they lack any competent programmers. I really did enjoy watching the dramas with RobustFS that Samsung released on their phones. You know you could quadruple and then some the I/O performance on the Galaxy S simply by converting the partition to ext4?

Yes at the time the Galaxy S was quite mean hardware. Yet the version of Eclair they shipped was about the only version of Android that I have seen which would force close apps because they were taking too long to load due to the OS overhead. The only good thing Samsung ever did was not lock down the bootloader on their devices. Although I'm not sure they did this out of kindness but rather their engineers were too dumb to figure out how.

I guess you have not been keeping up with developments on the GS. Since Gingerbread the performance boost from converting to ext4 has been pretty marginal because the phone is damn fast anyway. Not quite as fast as a vanilla Nexus S, I'll grant you, but very smooth and responsive. Samsung got their shit together.

Ha. Sorry yes they did fix *SOME* things, but overall the experience still pales in comparison to CM7 of the time.

Mind you what you're saying is not much of a defence. If it takes 2 MAJOR operating system releases spanned across 2 years to fix something that the hobby community solved within a few weeks it doesn't paint a shining example of "having their shit together".

That and I've had a play with their honeycomb tablets too which given the hardware also seem to be very poor in performance where it matters

Well, TFA says 1280x800. And 1.2 ghz processor is pretty much a given, there's almost nothing they could equip it with these days slower than that. 1.5 or 1.8 is more likely. 1 gig ram seems pretty likely too. So it seems this device has pretty good odds of delivering what you want.

By what metric? Given that Android uses a Linux kernel and similar drivers there are many parts of the system which should be equal in speed (thinking file system performance). But then there's also parts of Android that would be majorly let down in performance terms (such as UI rendering on pre ICS models which didn't support hardware acceleration nor give the UI a high thread priority).

How is posting links which talk about how much has been changed and added to UI rendering in ICS / Honeycomb, and that the UI runs in a default priority in any way evidence that what I said is "Not True?"

B) There isn't a UI thread in the same way as iOS has one because it doesn't make sense in a multi-tasking environment, so his statement doesn't make sense. The display is a composite of windows anyway.

Maybe I'm weird, but aside from not caring until they hit <$200, the main thing missing from tablets that I might otherwise be interested in is GPS.
If I buy a tablet, I want to be able to use it as a portable map (with better resolution than "you're somewhere within a mile or so of here") and maybe the occasional "augmented reality" application (e.g. Mixare [mixare.org]).
That's not ALL I'd want it for, of course, but its lack drops a tablet below my level of interest. Am I the only one?
(And am I mistaken, or wo

"And am I mistaken, or would adding GPS add no more than perhaps $2 to the marginal cost of each tablet these days?"

Don't know about the costs, but all gps enabled devices I have seem to have the GPS and 3G "glued together" on 1 chip. I guess it's to get AGPS to work. Adding a standalone GPS might be cheap, but it will take ages to get a fix.

As you say, adding a GPS radio to a tablet would probably only marginally increase the cost. But the deal breaker for the manufacturers is the big drain on battery life. And that seems to be a huge bullet item on the marketing spec sheets. Personally, GPS is a feature I want and if the tablet doesn't have an important feature I want, then really battery life becomes irrelevant to me. I guess I'm not an average consumer . . .

To be honest, you're right. Not to mention most tablets have horrible battery life anyway.I'd love to see someone add an extra 1/4 or even 1/2 inches to the thickness of a given device and cover the thing with another 20aH of capacity. Enough to run apps for several days if not a week or more!

I have a Xoom and an iPad. When the Xoom had HC on it the iPad got a lot of use as Honeycomb was a little too raw. But the day ICS as installed on this device the iPad was sat down and hasn't been picked up since. The experience has been wonderful. Even this tegra2 flies with Android 4.0 on it. All of the apps I have ever looked for have been available even apps to mmake apps right on the device itself. How cool is that? Nothing as complex as a modern smartphone or tablet will ever be perfect but the TMobile Nexus S and now Verizon Galaxy Nexus have been nothing short of superb. Fast fluid stable fun. Every
Thing I've wanted in one of these devices and I've used them all. In my collection I have an iPad an HD7 windows phone, a Nokia N770 mid, and several Android devices.

Android OEMs have struggled by themselves but with Google's help and Asus' engineering they could come up with something really great at a price point that is easily palatable by people not well off enough to afford 4 and 5 hundred dollar plus devices.The naysayers should wait until something is delivered before throwing irrational hate at a piece of circuitry and glass they've never even touched.

I have a Xoom and an iPad. When the Xoom had HC on it the iPad got a lot of use as Honeycomb was a little too raw. But the day ICS as installed on this device the iPad was sat down and hasn't been picked up since. The experience has been wonderful. Even this tegra2 flies with Android 4.0 on it.

While this is all anecdotal, I've had exactly the same experience with Asus Transformer - nice form factor but software was consistently underwhelming when it was Honeycomb. With ICS, it's like it's a completely different device.

Apple got one thing right on ipad3... high res. High enough for movie playback to have acceptable quality at last. Manufacturers figure it out: there is a large segment of the population waiting for tablets that do at least 1080p natively so they can be used to watch movies.

I 100% disagree. From experience. In my view, smart phones are too small to be useful, and many are too large to be a good phone. 10" is definitely too large to be portable (might as well haul around a smallish laptop at that point), too heavy and awkward to hold comfortably. 7" can fit into a purse, pocket (jeans or suit, even with a case on it), backpack, or whatever you want while still having plenty of space to do everything I could want. It's also a convenient size for holding with one hand.

Presumably, the reason has more to do with brand cohesion, specifically things like BLUR. Everyone already has expectations of what to expect with a Motorola Android device. These expectations will be broken (for better or for worse) on a "Nexus" device. Since ASUS is largely unknown to U.S. consumers, there is little in the way of expectations.

Alternatively, it should be noted that Pegatron, which is a spinoff from ASUS (and is still their primary ODM

Count me in for four at least for my own house, and as many for gifts for Christmas.

I'm ot sure where you're going with that 1984 rhetoric though. This stuff works for us, it delivers modern innovation - and yet it lets us do with it what we will. That's not the same thing at all as the dystopian vision you portend.

Have you some credible source, some study or even some analyst to call dire outcomes? Surely you must. Your fear, show me it.

Actually it doesn't sound like 1984 to me, more "Brave New World" where we basically drown in info overload. Considering that now one can live their life with all the info tailor made for whatever myopic view they have and you can have damned near anything fed ex to your doorstep so you never even have to leave your cave?

"You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse; gr

Yes, I agree: it is a completely different dystopian version, as is anything less than The Happy Hunting Grounds- but if you carry any tablet there, you 'll be laughed at at the door. By mountain Lions.

Count me in for four at least for my own house, and as many for gifts for Christmas.

What are you waiting for? You can get the Novo 7 advanced II for $130, or the Ramos W6HD for $144 right now. Both have capacative 7" touch screens with multitouch. Both run Android 4 Ice cream sandwich. The only difference with the Asus one is the brand name and the slightly-higher resolution screen compared with the Ramos. $200-$250 is "I gotta think about it" money. Under $150 falls into "compulsive buy" for some

What are you on about? He knows it's got a 7-inch display, he knows about how much it costs, he knows what software it runs. Does it really matter if the processor is 1.4GHz vs. 1GHz, or it has two cameras instead of one? You'll be able to use it to read books and watch videos either way.

And if he needs four of them, the difference between $800 vs. $2000 for 4 x iPad3 is $1200. That is no small amount of cash. You could use it as half the 20% down payment on a house [npr.org] for crying out loud. (Or you could get a

Couldn't have been too well played considering he's sitting on a big fat -1 Troll for his trouble. Not only that but the specs are pretty much a given. 1+ GHz proc 1280x800 screen, 1 GB RAM, Android 4.0+ 250 dollar or less price point. Damn facts always getting in the way.:)

Mod parent up. If you've lost root, well, erm, whoever has the password has full control, why bother installing a trojan?Seems silly to me - just install whatever payload you need, customize it to the compromized box.

There many things to worry about in this world all the way up with the existential things like war and famine. Getting ads that might actually show me something that appeals to me in exchange for the great things Google provides I'd pretty far down on my list of fears. Matter of fact I'll have to check but I'm pretty sure it didn't even make the cut.

It's not about android, that's been around for a while and lots here use it. It's the android fanbois on top of the idea that... It's an Asus hardware. I mean, seriously... We all see their quality and flare for superior hardware design, right? (/tongue-in-cheek humor)